Celtic Advent December 2nd
St. Llechid
St. Llechid, who died in 566 AD, was the daughter of a Breton prince, Ithel Huel. She and several of her brothers, including St. Trillo and St Tegai, were in a large party that was led by St. Cadfan to return from Brittany to Northern Wales, with a mission to re-establish churches. Her church is in the area now named after her, Llanlechid, in Caernarfonshire. Supposedly when she went to build her church, which was more of a chapel, the stones miraculously appeared overnight from a site more than a mile off. There was a well in the area named after her, which was rumored to have curative properties, particularly for scrofula (a now almost extinct form of bovine tuberculosis which humans get by drinking unpasteurized milk)
I am going to digress a little and talk about how I find saints to discuss, and how I found Llechid. I have several books on Celtic Saints lives, one of the most helpful being Shirley Toulson's The Celtic Year That had no entry for December 2nd, so I went on-line to a feed called Celtic and Old English Saints that has a wonderful daily listing, albeit usually brief. The only listing for the 2nd was an Englishman who failed miserably trying to minister to the Picts in the 700's. There is an Eastern Orthodox site that lists Celtic Saints--also no listing for December 2nd. Usually at that kind of juncture I start googling and try to sift out the junk.
I found St. Llechid as a minimal entry, with a feast day of December 2nd, in a page copy from google-books of a 19th century Welsh listing of saints, and took off on my research from there.
What was unusual in this search was that about 30% of the hits I was getting were from geneological databases. Initially I bypassed them, and then the whole issue of family heritage and spirituality hit me (the proverbial celestial 2x4).
In St. Llechid's family tree, which is basically the Royal House of Dumnonia and Armorica (Cornwall and Brittany) from the mid 400's on, there are listed a ton of saints, most of them with direct descent, father to daughter to grandson, etc. What a change from Roman Catholicism! In that discipline we have a few "families" who have multiple saints, Monnica and Augustine for example, or the Cappodocian family of Basil the great, but nothing like the 30 plus saints listed just in Llechid's family tree. The period the fluorishing of Celtic Christianity was obviously prior to the dictum from Rome that priests shouldn't marry and have children, and there didn't seem to be the restriction on monastics to have children either. Being Christian was, for the Celts, a major family affair, with a fair amount of support for spiritual growth within the large extended family.
Which got me to thinking about my own journey and the family members who influenced me spiritually. My mother took me to church regularly and talked a little about her own switch from her New England Unitarin upbringing to the Episcopal Church. But is was my Swiss grandmother, Sophie, and her daughter, my aunt Ethel, whose devotion and lifestyle continue to inspire me. They didn't preach but simply walked their talk, prayed daily, gave of what they had to the church and showed love and devotion to family and strangers alike. It was my Aunt who gave me my first personal bible, which I still have, at the time of my confirmation. Without them, I don't think I would have the spiritual roots that I have today.
I don't know how the continued growth of my own family spiritual tree is going to go. I think of all three of my children as having a strong moral and spiritual sense in their lives, although only one of them is nominally Christian. What happens from here on out is not up to me, but I obviously hope that I can be, as my grandmother and aunt were, an example to someone in the next generations of what it means to be a Christian in more than just going to Sunday services.
Lord, thank You for families where sincere faith abounds. Thank You for the quiet, almost contemplative lives of family members who show integrity in their beliefs and lifestyles and who continue to inspire us in our journey to You. Grant me the grace to continue that family heritage as my own familly tree puts out new branches. In Thy name, Amen
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